Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  American interrogators slowly grasped the nature and extent of the horrors that had been perpetrated at Unit 731, but they could find no proof. In the last days of the war, Ishii had ordered the execution of the last 150 “logs” at Unit 731, told his men that they must “take the secret to the grave,” and distributed cyanide capsules for them to use if they were arrested. Then he ordered the complex destroyed with explosives.

  Japanese police officers, acting on orders from the Counterintelligence Corps, found Ishii living almost openly in his hometown and arrested him. On January 17, 1946, he was brought to Tokyo. He was installed at his daughter’s home on a small street. Over the next four weeks, he sat willingly for interviews with a Camp Detrick scientist. They were informal and at times even genial.

  “He literally begged my father for top-secret data on germ weapons,” Ishii’s daughter later recalled. “At the same time, he emphasized that the data must not fall into the hands of the Russians.”

  Ishii admitted no crimes. He insisted that Unit 731 had not spread plague virus in China and that its experiments with toxins were performed only on laboratory animals. American military scientists suspected that he was lying, because reports from captured veterans of Unit 731 suggested that he had overseen experiments in which thousands of human subjects died. Detailed reports of these experiments would greatly accelerate the Americans’ research into biological warfare. They offered Ishii a stark choice: Tell us at least some of what you know, and you will be an asset worth protecting; stay silent, and you risk arrest by the Soviets and a possible death sentence. To this they added the promise for which Ishii had been waiting: the Americans were interested in “technical and scientific information … and not war crimes.”

  “If you will give me documentary immunity for myself, superiors, and subordinates, I can get all the information for you,” Ishii replied. “I would like to be hired by the U.S. government as a biological warfare expert.”

  Both sides had reason to pursue this deal. Ishii knew he faced trial and likely execution if he refused to cooperate. Camp Detrick scientists wanted to learn what he knew and were driven by a sense of urgency that overwhelmed whatever moral qualms they might have felt. At their request, the Supreme Command of Allied Powers, led by General Douglas MacArthur, secretly promulgated a new principle: “The value to the US of Japanese biological weapons data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war-crimes prosecution.”

  The next step was to apply this principle to Ishii and his comrades. General MacArthur had to move quickly because the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was about to open its epochal trial of suspected Japanese war criminals. He signed a secret decree granting amnesty to Ishii and all who had worked with him at Unit 731.

  “Statements from Ishii,” MacArthur reasoned, “can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels, and will not be employed as ‘War Crimes’ evidence.”

  Thus did the man responsible for directing the dissection of thousands of living prisoners during wartime, along with those who worked with him, escape punishment. Unlike their German counterparts, however, they were not brought to the United States. Instead the Japanese scientists were installed at laboratories and detention centers in East Asia. There they helped Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not be legally conducted in the United States.

  “Chalking that up to simple racism does not adequately account for why Ishii and his colleagues were not shipped to the United States,” one academic study has concluded. “America was not prepared politically or structurally for an influx of new Japanese scientists … There were too many technical and cultural barriers to overcome.”

  Once Ishii was guaranteed immunity from war crimes prosecution, he began turning over boxes of documents. They were full of uniquely valuable data about how various toxins affect the human body, how these toxins can be spread, and what dosage levels kill most effectively. Scientists at Camp Detrick were delighted.

  Ishii then guided the Americans to temples and mountain retreats where he and his men had hidden fifteen thousand microscope slides as the war was ending. Each slide contained a sliver of tissue from a human kidney, liver, spleen, or other organ that had suffered some sort of deadly shock. Victims had died after being exposed to extremes of temperature, or after being infected with anthrax, botulism, bubonic plague, cholera, dysentery, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, gangrene, or syphilis. Often the victims were still conscious when their organs were removed, because Ishii believed that the best data could be collected at the point of death. The slides were sent to Camp Detrick, where scientists reported that they “greatly supplemented and amplified” American research into biological warfare.

  “Information has accrued with respect to human susceptibility,” they wrote in one report. “Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation … It is hoped that individuals who voluntarily contributed this information will be spared embarrassment because of it.”

  While the Americans protected veterans of Unit 731, the Soviets captured twelve of them and charged them with war crimes. All were convicted and given prison terms ranging from two to twenty-five years. Their trials were not widely publicized. Over the following years, whenever reports about Unit 731 and Ishii’s work surfaced in the United States, government spokesmen dismissed them as Communist propaganda. Yet the Soviet sentences were light by post-war standards. Evidence later emerged suggesting that both the Soviet and Chinese governments used the expertise of Unit 731 veterans to advance their own bio-weapons programs.

  During the war years, Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii had known of, admired, and encouraged each other’s work. Designs of their medical torture centers were remarkably similar. When the Axis was finally defeated in 1945, it was reasonable to expect that they would share the same fate. So they did—but not the fate they might have feared. Scientists from Camp Detrick had rescued Ishii. Now they had to find a way to rescue Blome.

  * * *

  THE BANG OF the gavel that opened the “Doctors’ Trial” at Nuremberg was loud and sharp. One witness wrote that it “resounded throughout the large courtroom.” Brief formalities followed. The chief prosecutor, General Telford Taylor, presented his opening argument to a rapt audience.

  “All of the defendants herein unlawfully, willingly, and knowingly committed war crimes,” Taylor began. All had carried out “medical experiments without the subjects’ consent … in the course of which experiments the defendants committed murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts.” In excruciating detail, Taylor described experiments in which prisoners were killed by freezing, application of mustard gas to wounds, surgical removal of bones or muscle, poison bullets, exposure to extreme air pressures, and infection with malaria, typhus, and tuberculosis. Then he charged the defendants with hundreds of thousands of more murders through “the systematic and secret execution of the aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed children and other persons by gas, lethal injections, and diverse other means.” The court reporter whose job it was to record this litany wrote afterward that she “was having a great deal of trouble remaining dispassionate emotionally and trying to keep my composure.”

  Two well-known perpetrators of Nazi medical crimes were not in Courtroom 600 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice on that day, November 21, 1946. Heinrich Himmler had committed suicide in his cell. Josef Mengele, who directed medical experiments at Auschwitz, had disappeared. Nonetheless the remaining twenty-three defendants were a worthy gallery. They ranged from Hitler’s personal physician to doctors who supervised extreme experiments or mass killings at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, and other concentration camps. Among them was Kurt Blome.

  General MacArthur had rescued Ishii from punishment with a stroke of his pen, but rescuing Blome proved mo
re difficult. He had held highly visible positions. Nazi crimes were well known; Unit 731 could be hidden or glossed over because it had operated in remote Manchuria, but Nazi camps were in the heart of Europe. The system for processing suspected war criminals in Germany was more structured and difficult to manipulate than the one in Japan. Blome’s admirers at Camp Detrick could not protect him from indictment. Instead they concentrated on securing his acquittal.

  Blome put up a spirited defense. Addressing the court in fluent English, he concentrated on two points. First, he insisted that although there was much circumstantial evidence against him—including the letter from Himmler ordering him to supply toxin for “special treatment” of prisoners—no witnesses could be found to testify that he had actually carried out the atrocities he wrote about, discussed, or was ordered to direct. Second, he produced an article from Life magazine describing a U.S. Army study in which prisoners at an Illinois penitentiary were infected with malaria so that its effects could be studied. He argued that these experiments, and others that American doctors had conducted in prisons, were no more unethical than his own.

  Blome’s testimony was not all that helped his case. The desire of scientists at Camp Detrick to protect him was quietly communicated to U.S. military officers involved in the “Doctors’ Trial.” Verdicts were handed down on August 27, 1947. Seven of the defendants were sentenced to hang. Nine others received prison terms. Seven were acquitted. Blome was among this last group. Judges said that they suspected he had directed experiments on human beings but could find no clear evidence.

  “The deck was clearly stacked,” according to one German study of this trial. “Convincing proof of Blome’s involvement in [SS Dr. Sigmund] Rasher’s experiments at the Dachau concentration camp was not presented. His role in experiments with malaria germs and poison gas could supposedly not be proven. Even as prosecutors asked that he be sentenced, they must have realized that it would not happen.”

  Forty-two days after Blome was found not guilty, the chief of the army’s Chemical Corps received a simple message from the Counterintelligence Corps in Germany: “Available now for interrogation on biological warfare matters is Doctor Kurt Blome.” Immediately he dispatched a team of Camp Detrick scientists. Blome welcomed them. He was reluctant to discuss his experiments on human subjects, the topic that most interested them. At one session, though, he mentioned that he had investigated an operation in which Polish resistance fighters killed more than a dozen SS officers by squirting typhoid germs from what appeared to be a fountain pen into their food. That fascinated his interrogators. Blome had studied techniques of poisoning without detection. That seemed just the beginning of what he could teach his new friends. Finally he made an offer: bring me to America, and I will revolutionize your bio-warfare program.

  * * *

  FOR A CORE of Americans who served in the military and in intelligence agencies during World War II, the war never really ended. All that changed was the enemy. The role once played by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was assumed by the Soviet Union and, after 1949, “Red China.” In the new narrative, monolithic Communism, directed from the Kremlin, was a demonic force that mortally threatened the United States and all humanity. With the stakes so existentially high, no sacrifice in the fight against Communism—of money, morality, or human life—could be considered excessive. This conviction, unspoken but almost universally shared in Washington, came to undergird and justify one of the most bizarre covert projects ever launched by any government.

  In 1945, President Truman decided that the United States did not need a clandestine intelligence agency during peacetime, and he abolished the Office of Strategic Services. Two years later he changed his mind and signed the National Security Act, which created the Central Intelligence Agency. That law, written in part by Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer who was aching to return to the clandestine world, is loosely worded. It authorizes the CIA to carry out “functions and duties related to intelligence affecting national security,” and to use “all appropriate methods” in that pursuit.

  The CIA’s first covert operations were in Europe, where the Cold War was most intense. In 1947 its officers hired Corsican gangsters to break a Communist-led strike at the port of Marseille. The next year it ran a successful campaign to prevent Communists from winning a national election in Italy. It sent spies, saboteurs, and commando squads into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These were bold operations, but similar to others that secret services had been carrying out for generations. Then a sudden shock from Budapest gave the CIA—and scientists at Camp Detrick—a new fear that set them on a new course.

  On February 3, 1949, the Roman Catholic prelate of Hungary, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, appeared at a show trial and confessed to extravagant charges of attempting to overthrow the government, directing black market currency schemes, and seeking to steal the royal crown as part of a plot to re-establish the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Leaders of Western countries were outraged. President Truman denounced the trial as “infamous.” Pope Pius XII called it “a serious outrage which inflicts a deep wound,” and excommunicated all Catholics involved. Senior CIA officers reacted differently. They focused on the way Mindszenty had behaved during his trial. He appeared disoriented, spoke in a flat monotone, and confessed to crimes he had evidently not committed. Clearly he had been coerced—but how?

  At the CIA, the answer seemed terrifyingly obvious: the Soviets had developed drugs or mind control techniques that could make people say things they did not believe. No evidence of this ever emerged. Mindszenty was coerced with traditional techniques like ill treatment, extended isolation, beatings, and repetitive interrogation. The fear that Communists had discovered some potent new psychoactive tool, however, sent a shock wave through the CIA. It also gave Camp Detrick a new mission.

  In the first years after World War II, scientists at Camp Detrick found themselves out of favor. The reason was simple. American military planners had concluded that since the United States now had nuclear weapons, developing biological ones was no longer a priority. Political attention, along with the funding that accompanies it, had shifted decisively to nuclear-related programs. That rendered Camp Detrick almost irrelevant. Work slowed down. Many scientists were redeployed or allowed to return to civilian life. Those who remained were looking for a new mission. The Mindszenty trial gave them one.

  Alarmed commanders of the Chemical Corps moved quickly. In the spring of 1949 they created a secret team at Camp Detrick, the Special Operations Division, whose scientists would conduct research into ways that chemicals could be used as weapons of covert action. One of the first scientists to join the new division called it “a little Detrick within Detrick … Most of the people didn’t know what was going on in SO, and got angry because you wouldn’t tell ’em.”

  The coercive use of drugs was a new field, and Special Operations scientists had to decide how to begin their research. CIA officers in Europe were facing a parallel challenge. They were regularly capturing suspected Soviet agents and were looking for interrogation techniques that would allow them to draw these prisoners away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets, and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will. The Mindszenty trial stoked their fear that Soviet scientists had already perfected these techniques. That stirred the CIA to urgent action.

  3

  Willing and Unwilling Subjects

  Disorienting waves of dizziness enveloped Dr. Albert Hofmann during an experiment with ergot enzyme at the Sandoz laboratory in Basel on April 16, 1943. He bicycled home with unusual difficulty, lay down, and closed his eyes. At first he felt pleasantly inebriated. Then his imagination began to race. For the next two hours he careened through what he later called “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness, accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors.”

  The ergot enzyme, found naturally in fungus that grows on ry
e and other grains, has been recognized for centuries as therapeutic, but it can also cause spasms and hallucinations. Hofmann, a research chemist, had been testing a new permutation that he hoped would improve blood circulation. When he awoke the next morning, he suspected that ergot, which during the Middle Ages was associated with stories of witchcraft and possession, had been the cause of his intoxication. Yet the symptoms he had experienced did not match any ever recorded. He decided to conduct an experiment with himself as the subject. Three days after his first experience, he swallowed 250 micrograms of the substance he had been testing, a minute amount. Half an hour later, he wrote in his journal that he felt “no trace of any effect.” His next entry is a scrawled note that trails off after the words “difficulty in concentration, visual disturbances, marked desire to laugh.” This experience, he wrote afterward, was “much stronger than the first time.”

  I had great difficulty in speaking coherently, my field of vision swayed before me, and objects appeared distorted like images in curved mirrors … As far as I remember, the following were the most outstanding symptoms: vertigo, visual disturbances; the faces of those around me appeared as grotesque, colored masks; marked motoric unrest, alternating with paralysis; an intermittent heavy feeling in the head, limbs and the entire body, as if they were filled with lead; dry, constricted sensation in the throat; feeling of choking; clear recognition of my condition, in which state I sometimes observed, in the manner of an independent, neutral observer, that I shouted half insanely or babbled incoherent words. Occasionally I felt as if I were out of my body … An unending series of colorful, very realistic and fantastic images surged in upon me … At about one o’clock I fell asleep and awoke next morning feeling perfectly well.